Wisdom - key ideas Flashcards
An emotional education is an area that has for too long, seemed like a realm of intuition and luck. We have bugs in our emotional software.
The meaning of life - a concept that is eminently plausible
Some of our most meaningful moments are to do with instances of connection or when we transcend our egos to put ourselves in the service of others
An obstacle to a meaningful life is a suspicion of introspection and psychotherapy
Sadness feels very taboo. Societies tend slyly to insist on cheerfulness. Sorrow is not an individual failing; it is a basic reality for our entire species.
Schopenhauer advises us to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy. Max Weber “art provides salvation from the routines of everyday life”.
We live so close to ourselves, we know so much about our private failings, we miss that our flaws are general
If only we could see into the minds of strangers, we would feel so much less alone.
Winning higher status makes us increasingly sensitive to its loss. We start to note every possible new snub.
We may – for the sake of true riches – willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little poorer and more obscure.
We should be worried by truth and not opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts.
Modern education says we must learn about technical subjects. What we need is an education system devoted to wisdom and emotional development.
We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re multitasking rather than failing to focus. We are ‘technostressed’: we feel we must constantly check our various accounts because we can.
Work means everything to us. We’ve believed that it builds character. These beliefs are no longer plausible, because there’s not enough work to go around.
You were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.
Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of a healthy human being.
Emotional intelligence is what distinguishes those who are crushed by failure from those who know how to greet the troubles of existence with a melancholy and at points darkly humorous resilience.
We don’t quite grasp just how rare and strange ninety years on earth without major disasters in love and work might actually be.
Our brains have a habit of fatefully misunderstanding statistics.
To be calm, we must reduce the weight of our proud and unrealistic modern individualism.
To restore calm we need to become strategically pessimistic. That is, to spend more time getting used to the very real possibility that things will work out rather badly.
The secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement
The way to calm is through analysis. We need to spend time on self-knowledge. We must make a constant effort to take apart moods of anxiety in order to pinpoint their real causes.
We need to remind ourselves – on a regular basis – that inexpensive, simple things may often have much more to offer us. A capacity for appreciation, not money, is the key to a certain kind of calm.
People who might belittle you for actually unimportant reasons are, themselves, fraught with insecurity. They threaten to attack because they are so fearful that others will mock them.
We naturally exaggerate our own importance. The incidents of our own lives loom very large in our view of the world. Yet, really, we are entirely dispensable. The world would trundle on much the same without us.
We need a reminder that life can be lived perfectly well in ways that are quite different from our own.
Philosophy, according to Aristotle, should be focused on the higher-order questions. It doesn’t focus on HOW to do things, so much as on WHY they might be worth doing.
The potential of daydreaming isn’t recognised by societies obsessed with productivity.
Alongside our privileges, we grow impoverished in curious ways. We have very limited control over our time.
Life can only ever be a process of changing the focus of pain, never removing pain itself. There will always be something to agonise us.
In a world that’s very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures. Dostoyevsky’s attitude is needed more than ever in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea that science can save us all and that we may yet be made perfect through technology.
He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth - Johann von Wolfgang von Goethe
Why do philosophy?
Philosophy is a way of corrupting the youth. We should be corrupting the youth.
It’s a way of livening things up. Otherwise we’re dead by just accepting the things we’re told.
The paradox in Socrates is that he was the wisest man in Greece but that he knew nothing.
Truth does not consist in accepting what we’re told but in finding out for ourselves.
Philosophy begins in wonder.
